Reprinted with permission from Shareblue. Lobbyists are flocking to Washington, D.C., and flooding the city with more money seeking to buy influence than has been spent in seven years. The dynamic where businesses are spending more to pay off politicians and other public figure coincides with a parade of unethical action and behavior from Donald […]

Checking in on the president’s often-repeated campaign promise to reform the business of government — by banning lobbyists, enforcing ethics, and stemming the influence of big money — Seth Meyers finds that the swamp is just as dank and dismal as ever.

With Paul Manafort long ousted from Trump’s inner circle, and Steve Bannon apparently headed toward the White House exit, Danziger foresees an ominous partnership between these practitioners of dark politics.

Trump’s constant weekend golfing visits to Mar-a-Lago, his Palm Beach estate and private club, have cost us tens of millions of dollars already — and are projected to cost far more, depending how long he remains president. In the meantime, the grifting Trumps are actually profiting from his use of the “Southern White House” for high-profile meetings with heads of state.

Unlike appointees exposed to the scrutiny of the Senate, members of these so-called “beachhead teams” have operated largely in the shadows, with the White House declining to publicly reveal their identities.

Former Kentucky Governor Steve Beshear issued a formal Democratic response to Trump’s address to Congress on Tuesday. But the most blistering reply may have belonged to Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders (D-VT), who took to Facebook shortly thereafter.

As a candidate, Trump regularly railed against lobbyists and led crowds in chants of “Drain the swamp!” But as president, Trump signed an executive order that weakened significant aspects of the Obama ethics policy, including scrapping a ban on lobbyists joining agencies they had recently lobbied.

Public opinion surveys consistently reveal that the great majority of us say that people on the lower rungs of the economic ladder — the poor and the failing middle class— are the ones Congress should focus on. But, then, regular people don’t run Congress — or Donald Trump’s White House.

For an industry premised on dealmaking, the return of one-party rule in Washington offers the welcome end to political gridlock. That means major policy changes are in the works, which promise to fundamentally alter billion-dollar industries. Far from draining the swamp, the Trump administration is poised to make it rain.

Did Trump say he was going to drain the swamp? Jeff Danziger sees him pondering his own vows in the muck, among the dangerous and dirty swamp critters who have always known better than to believe a word he says.

The United States has stood as a beacon to the world — a “shining city on a hill” — because of the values we represent, and Trump’s autocratic and ethnocentric views are the absolute antithesis of what this great nation has stood for and a violation of the spirit of the Founding Fathers.

Corey Lewandowski, former Trump campaign manager, CNN commentator, and Koch brothers minion, is about to move from his New Hampshire home to Washington, D.C., where he plans to open his own little consulting outfit in that same ole swamp — collecting big bucks from special interests that want him to carry their contracts to the White House.

In Trump’s picks for economic and domestic policymaking jobs, there’s a consistent underlying thread. Most of them could have been nominated by any GOP nominee. There’s nary a populist among them — not even the conservative kind.